HAPPY BIRTHDAY MANDY!

Andre & Ivan

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Ten years old today!

(Updated photos to follow.)

What To Do When You Have a Flat Tire

If you find yourself with a flat tire on your vehicle, this is what you should do:

1 - Notice the flat tire before you get into your vehicle so you don't have to drive out of the driveway, notice something is wrong, and say: "Oh CRAP!" in front of your children, and have to drive backwards down the street and back into the parking lot that you just pulled out of.

2 - Be immediately thankful that you have a cell phone (if you have one) and use it to call your brother who works with your husband (who is otherwise unreachable) over and over and over and over and over until he finally answers.

3 - Ask said brother to deliver your husband (who otherwise would be waiting for you to pick him up) to you so he can help change the tire because you can't figure out how to get the spare out from under the car. (You are otherwise very capable of changing the tire as you've done it several times before - all by yourself).

4 - Remind your bored and cranky children how lucky they are that they are standed at a park and not alongside the freeway as you easily could have been.

5 - Do NOT allow your teenage son to sit in the car and listen to his CD while he waits because he is so bored and too big to play on the equipment at the park.

6 - Be as helpful and cheerful as you can to your husband when he arrives as he is very, very tired and sore from a very long day on his feet at work, but also try to allow your teenage son to watch closely so that one day he will know how to fix a flat tire.

7 - Also remain cheerful and positive when your husband becomes angry at you because the car won't start because the battery is dead because you didn't follow instruction #5.

8 - Be a good backer-upper and steerer when your teenage son and your husband push your car across the parking lot to a space where there would be room for another car to pull up and give you a jump start.

9 - After the car has been jump-started by a kind stranger and you are finally on your way home, remind everybody how wonderful it is that everything turned out so nicely, when it all could have been so much worse.

10 - Post the entire incident on your blog for all your friends and family to read so that they may know that these kinds of things happen to everyone and it always makes for a good story to share when there would otherwise be nothing of interest to blog about, and hope that it garners a good batch of comments because you really don't get very many otherwise.

Manti

Last week we all went to Manti, UT to see the Mormon Miracle Pageant. It was fantastic!

I went to it when I was 13, but Jim and the kids had never seen it. I had great memories of the pageant from when I had gone before and I wanted my kids to have those same memories.



The Manti Temple is a beautiful granite temple and it sits up on a beautiful grassy hill overlooking the Sanpete Valley. It is surrounded by lush green lawn below the hill. The pageant takes place on the hill with seating on the grassy area below.

Small Miracles

Sometimes it seems that life conspires against you. Sometimes it seems that the timing of things just works out to make things suck for you. Sometimes it seems that you can never catch a break. And all of this that I'm talking about it financial, because that seems to be the basis for most of our problems in this Beckstrom family.

So, Today was Nikita's birthday. She and I planned a day out together.

Tomorrow, we are all going down to Manti to see the Miracle Pageant.

Friday, is payday.

We did our best to save for both of these things, but life happened (as it does every week) and it all costed money.

We were worried about ending the day today with enough money to fill our tank enough to get us down to Manti (our only vacation this year).

Jim has been trying to sell his pickup truck. He hadn't had any luck for about 3 weeks.

Well - First small miracle - Today somebody wanted to buy it! He wanted to give us cash!

But. . . we couldn't find the title for it. He wouldn't buy it without it.

Jim had just seen the title a few weeks ago, but no matter where we looked, we couldn't find it.

We prayed frantically in our heads as we searched in all the most likely (and unlikely) places. I even searched the bathroom!

Well, after we came up with what we hoped would be a solution (which would involve a lot of phone calls and faxes) we went on with our evening of trying to host Nikita's party with her friends.

So Nikita's girlfriends decided they wanted to see videos of her when she was little. So I looked for them, and guess what? I couldn't find them anywhere! So I hollered up the stairs for Jim to look in a certain drawer for the tapes. They weren't in there!

But guess what was???

Yes, Second Miracle - (lack of suspense!) the title for the truck!

We had both looked there earlier and never saw it.

So everything is all good now (for now).

I guess that even when we're grumbling around thinking that nothing ever works out for us and God has just left us to flounder around on our own, sometimes He's actually paying attention and helps us out.

I'm so glad for those small miracles!

Now, if we could just find a new car for Jim and I wouldn't have to take him to work at 4:30 every morning. . . . .

Nikita

Look at this beautiful girl! That's my baby girl, and she just turned 18 today! (Again, I'm wishing for a camera (and a scanner) so I could post now-and-then photos of her). As I've been looking through pictures of all of her past birthdays, I'm realizing that her life has just flown by. I so wish I could share some of those pictures with you here.

I can still remember, as if I'm still there, when she was first born. The doctor handed her to me saying, "It's a girl!" I was so happy to have my little baby girl, I just kept saying over and over, "My baby, my baby, my baby!" I couldn't believe that she was really mine. All mine. (Well, I did have to share her with Jim.) I thought she was the most amazingly beautiful thing, even covered with all that while gook. I just kept kissing her and touching her little face. She was my own perfect little alien.

Then I remember later, after she was all cleaned up and the nurse left her with me for the first time alone in the hospital room. I looked down at her little face, and she looked up at me with a look that said, "OK, Mom - Now what?" Then suddenly, I was really scared! The nurse just walked away and left me alone with this baby. No instructions, no suggestions, no handy manual, NOTHING! We were on our own. Jim and I just got to take her home and do whatever we thought was best with her. I couldn't believe we didn't have to sign our lives away for her. We just got to keep her! Of course, we didn't have medical insurance at the time, so she wasn't really free. It took us years to pay her off!

But, lucky for me, Jim was already a Daddy to Peter and Mandy. And he had been such a good Daddy and he loved them so much, so I felt pretty good about him "Daddying" Nikita.

Well, 18 years later, I can say I think we did a pretty good job with her. She is such a loving and happy girl (or should I now say "young woman"?) We love her so much. She has brought our family so much joy and laughter. And the amazing thing is, she still likes us!

She still has another year of high school, but before I know it, we'll be at that stage again:

"OK, Mom - Now what?"

Now I'm getting scared!

Summer in Utah

How I wish I had a camera!

Now that it's summer, there are so many things I want to post here that I am loving about summer in Utah.

For instance, today I would love to share a picture of my beautiful roses in full bloom.

We have about 2 dozen bushes of all different colors.

I would also share a picture of the little visitor from the rose garden that we caught in the kitchen just now.

What is interesting about this visitor, though, is that it's about an inch long! It's just a honey bee, but it's bigger and fatter than any bumble bee I've ever seen.

He's now safely enclosed in a jar on the counter so we can show it off.

I know that by keeping it captive we're probably contributing to the honeybee shortage and driving up the cost of honey. But there is nobody here that I would wish a sting upon from this particular bee. But as scary as it is, it's not nearly as bad as the scorpion that my boys found in the kitchen last summer in San Antonio, or the tarantula that we trapped in the kitchen window there.

Yes, I think I'm liking summer here in Utah!